Suella Braverman, she would like us to know, is “not English”. She may have been born in English, support the England football team and be “proud to be British”. But, as she helpfully explained in a recent Tweet, “Englishness is an ethnicity. There have been English people for centuries and we need to recognise this more”.
There are multiple problems with this logic, some of which you’d almost certainly spotted. But a big one is: people whose entire bloodline have always been English are remarkably difficult to find. Consider some people who definitely don’t count.
Winston Churchill. Mum was American – who knows what was going on there – and Dad, though descended from the Dukes of Marlborough, had Irish ancestry too. Hmmm.
Boris Johnson. Great grandfather was a Turkish journalist. Bits of Lithuanian-Jewish and Bavarian in there, too, and he was born in the USA.
Nigel Farage. Has German and French Huguenot ancestry.
David Cameron. Bit Scottish.
Tony Blair. Very Scottish.
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St George. The patron saint of England is, unpatriotically, also patron saint of Georgia, Catalonia, Ethiopia and rather a lot of other places. Hailing from 3rd century Asia Minor, he’s often described as “Turkish”, but the ancestors of the Turks hadn’t arrived yet, so this is ahistorical: he was actually a Greek-speaking Roman. Mind you, since he claimed to have killed a dragon, one wonders if he had links to Indonesia, too.
King Edward the Confessor. England’s original patron saint was the son of Emma of Normandy, the French-Viking region where he grew up. So he wasn’t truly English either.
King Charles III. Dad a baffling mix of Danish and Greek; mum suspiciously German. Neither Charles nor his 28th great-granduncle Edward are in any way unusual: not only has the monarchy imported princesses of marriageable age from all over Europe, but at various times the English throne has been occupied by Germans, Dutch, Scots, Welsh, Normans, Danes and a Dutchman. (Feels somehow telling that the Irish are about our only direct neighbours that didn’t get a go.) Even Alfred the Great, the very founder of the English state, has a plaque in the Walhalla monument in Bavaria. It exists to honour great Germans.
Ben Stokes. Sure, the former captain of the England test team may be one of the greatest cricket all-rounders this country ever produced – but it is an inescapable fact he was actually from New Zealand.
Half the England football team. Many of the best England footballers – how to put this delicately – would not meet Suella Braverman’s standards for English ethnicity. Thomas Tuchel’s 26-man squad for summer’s World Cup contained 20 players who could hve represented another country.
Most of the Beatles. All except Ringo had extensive ancestry from Ireland; Lennon was a bit Welsh, too. Unsurprising, when they hailed from a city whose residents sometimes describe themselves as “Scouse, not English”.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. The man who’d rather be known as Tommy Robinson holds an Irish passport through his Irish mother.
Paddington Bear. Not merely an immigrant from darkest Peru, but a suspiciously hairy one. Probably quite swarthy under there, too.
The residents of Piddington. Whatever their ancestry, the residents of the Oxfordshire village have declared their independence. And if they’re willing to give up their citizenship, and all the rights and access to state support that come with it, on a point of principle*, then I think we should respect that.
*Hating asylum seekers.
Boudica. The Queen of the Iceni, who led the revolt against the Roman invaders the first century AD, was a member of the Britonnic/Celtic/proto-Welsh peoples who lived on this island long before the English – descendants of Anglo-saxon immigrants who arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries – ever set foot on it.
Of course, all these people actually are English, because all identities are constructed, and there is no such thing as pure anything. This has recently been explained by – of all people – Jacob Rees-Mogg, who argued that the English are “a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race”.
Then again, what can you expect from a man who, judging from his surname, is clearly half-Welsh and half-cat?
